Portland Press Herald - failing the Sears Island debate

Portland Press Herald - failing the Sears Island debate
It is with a sense of wonder that one observes the great pains the Portland Press Herald takes to avoid news coverage or even block commentary on the most important coastal issue that Maine has faced in years - the push to industrialize Sears Island at the head of Penobscot Bay.

The natural island - fallow since the dawn of the twentieth century, and recolonized by a remarkable and unique mix of Maine's coastal species; a natural Noah's Ark, if you will - is flanked on the western side by a large eelgrass-dotted shoal.

Here, the brackish waters created by the meeting of fresh river water with salt bay water host the Bay's great fish nursery, as diverse it its makeup as the island above. Here young salmon have their first encounter with salt water, learn to school and head oceanward. Here myriads of the small shrimp Pandalus Montagui prowl the muddy bayfloor, and are greedily seized upon by juveniles of cod, haddock, flounder, themselves heeding the Call of the wild Gulf of Maine.

But this is well known to the Press Herald's Dieter Bradury; he covered the successful fight to block the Angus King port plan for Sears Island, which was withdrawn by King once it was shown the impacts to marnie and upland wildlife would be too severe to mitigate.

Hey Deets! Where are you? Dieter is surely aware of the Joint Use Plan that the Baldacci Administration is pressing forward on. The one that would legislatively zone the western side of the island for a marine container port that would of necessity torpedo this Noah's Ark; the roar and thunder and diesel stench of the container port would drive most wildlife from the island; it would certainly reduce the revenue of the resorts on the nearby coast; the nursery shoal would largely disappear, to the great loss of the Bay's marine ecol9ogy and its fishermen.

But he is silent. As are all Portland Press Herald reporters and the rest of the Blethenian newspapers. Bradbury's last coverage, comically enough, was fawning coverage of a December 07 award & tribute to Sierra Club's Joan Saxe as "Environmental Hero" for, among other things, saving Sears Island from Angus King's machinations. (Joan is presently the Sierra Club point person in selling out the island to the Baldacci port proponents.)


But it's not only Dieter. John Richardson, environment reoprter for PPH is likewise silent.

The Press Herald's editorial staff has apparently decided that public dissent with the Baldacci administration on the future of the island is...too heretical to be allowed to grace their letters section or their op ed page. The perfidy of the Maine Chapter of the Sierra Club in supporting the Baldacci plan is likewise not a topic that the Press Herald considers appropriate. Their total editorial section publications on Sears Island for the last three years?

Sears Island report a sensible compromise May 20, 2007
and
Don't foreclose idea of Sears Island cargo port November 24, 2006

Why? How could this mighty newspaper kowtow so deeply to the gods of commerce that they selfcensor with such vigor on this topic?

Is it even smarmier? Are certain editors themselves Sierra Club members, circling the wagons against the besmirching of the Club's honor?

What?

LD 2029 Hearing - what the People said

For those journalistas who might have even a gleam of curiousity about what the citizens and public interests said about the plan to fuse Maine's county jails and state prison, but couldn't find them anywhere in the printed or electronic media CLICK HERE

Maine legislative coverage: PPH omits activists POV at LD 2029 hearing

You wouldn't know from the article State, Counties agree 'in principle' on jails that any representatives of the many public interests working to reform Maine corrections law were on hand January 28, 08 when the Maine Legislature's Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee held a hearing on LD 2029, "An Act To Reduce Property Taxes, Eliminate Duplication and Streamline Government by Unifying the State Prisons and County Jails" Sponsored by Committee co-chair Stanley Gerzofsky.

In fact from reading the article, it's a pretty good guess that the writer whomever he or she is didn't actually attend, and is deservedly hiding behind the Associated press cloak of anonymity.


Why some writers don't even bother to listen to the live webstream of these hearings, or record it for later listening bothers me. Instead what is submitted to the public as coverage is but coverage of a shadow of the event: an impressionistic story as seen though other lenses that his or her own.

The Brunswick Times/Record's Victoria Wallack was there and did a better job, but like the Herald, no mention in her piece of the public interest groups who spoke, warning against misuse of the new proposed system for internal exile and worse.

See a detailed article on the proposal and its background from tiny paper All American Patriots of Sweden Maine.

Bad PPH! No donut!

Maine Things Considered flubs big prison consolidation story

It was irritating listening to Maine public radio's coverage of today's hearing (Jan 29, 08) held by the Maine Legislature's Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee on LD 2029, a bill authorizing the state taking over Maine's county jails and adding them to the state corrections system.

Commissioner Martine Magnusson, here flanked by two county officials , was there. MTC simply didn't trouble to show up.

Nor even bother grab some audio of the testimony from the Committee's live web stream. Instead Maine Things Considered coverage (click on their 01/28/08 Monday progam) featured generalizations and a few phone bites from Dept of Corrections' associate commissioner for PR flackery Denise Lord, and other officialdom, who offered up blandly self congratulatory statements about the process of the proposal, not so much its implications for Maine society.

MTC missed an impressive hearing, and instead imbibed some tepid spin. Has MPBN cut down the number of MTC reporters/producers, or were too many other great things afoot? Let's hope the latter.

Happily while Maine Things Considered's microphones were nowhere in evidence, and WCSH intermittent, three print journalists knelt along one end of the long narrow room, their hands racing across notepads almost in unison, taking it down. Tomorrow's papers will show the result.

WCSH's Don Carrigan and camera guy popped in and out, capturing but a few of the official speakers before heading off to other legislative committee rooms. Maybe he took some shots from the doorway later on...?

The tiny committee room was filled with well-pressed suits and uniforms; a mingling of state and county correctional and law enforcers, none of whom testified on the bill LD 2029.

Neatly holstered tasers, the new electric whips, shone bright yellow here and there in the packed chamber. The atmosphere before and after the hearing was of well-disposed prosperous jailors and prison managers comparing pay packages. There had been some marathon sessions by statewide conference calls connecting all county and state correction officials, at which a major change (throwing more money to the counties) resulted in a shift by counties toward accepting the merger plan

That the commodity, sentenced Mainers in need of "beds", was a sure and constantly renewing resource, requiring long term financial planning and sophisticated inmate resource management, appeared a consensus of this assembly of the security officialdom of Maine, as well as the MM Association.

On the other hand a small number of reform-minded citizens came to the hearing; nearly all spoke precautionary words to the committee on such things as the potential for the merged system to break the vital connection between incarcerateds and their community and family that so demonstrably is needed to provide successful reentry thereto; gulagization: the possibility of the fused jails and state corrections facilities being used to punitively put 'troublemaker' jailees into 'internal exile' by sending them to facilities at distant ends of the state, or even, as the state already does with 'troublemaker' inmates under its supervision, to exile to distant states like Maryland.

In both cases and the risk of the proposed system causing the shunting of mentally ill jail inmates from around the state into a single designated mental ward jail, again far from home, from community support.

Important as the discussion was, apart from the print journalists (who all three likely had well-earned writer's cramps by the time the marathon hearing ended, Maine public radio media flubbed it. Here's a big D- for failing to properly cover the opening salvos of one of the contention over the most societally important bills of the Maine legislature this year. Don Carrigan & crew gets a C+; at least they got some stock footage. The print men and woman? Time will tell...

Portland Press Herald & Plum Creek - joined at the hip.

As noted by Jeff Inglis in the Portland Phoenix (Click Here) Plum Creek's CEO joined the Board of Directors of the company that owns the Portland Press Herald 18 months ago - just as the Creeklings began its efforts to sell the public on their plan to build nearly 1000 homes and condos and two hotels around Moosehead Lake in Maine’s North Woods.

The Portland Press Herald, known for trumpeting the "historic" nature of the Plummies' plan, had never revealed this little fact about their ties with Plum Creek until it was mentioned as an aside in the Seattle Times, another paper in the Blethen stable.

PPH's Richardson drops "historic" from Plum coverage?

Perhaps there's hope for him yet. If J-Rich continues he might find his coverage praised by historians of the future, not discarded as syncophantic.

But can the Press Herald afford not to be syncophantic towards Plum Creek?
How strong is the corporate interlock betwixt PPH-owner Blethen and the Plum People?

That there is one is known. What part it plays in the day to day coverage of industrial forestry in Maine as well as PPH scrutiny of Plum Creek's mega development efforts can only be seen through the lens of the paper's news and editorial archives. Something to be done in later posts.

Portland Press Herald's John Richardson: Plum crazy about sprawl.

In his recent article "Plum Creek plan aired, 2nd hearing set for today in Augusta" 12/2/07 (which, thanks to the reduction in reporters in the Blethen Company's Maine bundle of newspapers, appeared simultaneously in the Maine Sunday Telegram, the Kennebec Journal and the Morning Sentinel) reporter John Richardson repeatedly salutes the "historic" nature of the massive Plum Creek sprawl proposal for the Moosehead Lake region, and relegates nearly all opposition to the proposal to the distant parts of his article well beyond the fold.

Get a grip, John: what's "historic" here are the untrammeled views and natural wide spaces of Moosehead Lake, better known for the last few thousand years as Mousinibes, btw, and its environs. Not the sprawl wannabe.

He starts off well, contrasting the pro and con one liners of two residents of Greenville , the small town nestled on the southern tip of Moosehead Lake. But it all goes downhill from there.

Richardson found that "Strong opinions weren't lacking" at the Saturday meeting, but manages to quote only the strong opinions of Plum-huggers Ray "Bucky" Owen, Millinocket resident Dan Corcoran, Rep. Doug Thomas, R-Ripley, "one of several current and former state legislators who spoke in favor of the plan" (did any speak against, one wonders), Randy Comber ( owner of Moosehead Cedar Log Homes, obviously a potential beneficiary of a building boom at Moosehead Lake, and Christopher Fife, of Moose River, in Jackman, west of Moosehead Lake.

Richardson's selection of opponents verged more on the milktoasty: "Some opponents agreed that the plan today is better than the one first unveiled by Plum Creek three years ago" Richardson writes, going on to quote only one of the "some", Sally Farrand. Her position?

"I think we can all agree the current application is much improved," said Sally Farrand of Beaver Cove. But, Farrand said, "I ask that Lily Bay be removed from the development plan."

Certainly every other opponent of the Plummers will agree that the shore of Moosehead Lake's Lily Bay shouldn't be sprawled upon; they also, however, urge the same status for the rest of the acreage within Plum Creek development footprint. All of it

While he does acknowledge there are 'critics' of the plan, they are given short shrift and are, apart from one, exiled to the end of the article, and in general portrayed as merely quibbling over bits of the Plum Creek proposal, not against the whole kaboodle as the overwhelming number of Mainers across the economic and political spectrum are.

Come on, J-Man: What's this? You're not doing a fair 'n balancin' act on us, are you?

The bright stars and Milky Way reflecting on Moosehead waters in the deep dark of unspoiled night. The keeping of this vast lake largely in a state of Nature through all these years and now into the 21st century. That's Maine history, alive and well.

Large scale developer wannabe Plum Creek's plan isn't historic. It's the very opposite of historic. It is the destroyer of history.